Double Fine has let go 12 of its employees following the cancellation of an “unannounced” game.

The unfortunate news was confirmed on Friday in an interview with studio head Tim Schafer. According to Schafer, the cancellation was decided by the mystery title’s publisher.

“One of our unannounced projects was unexpectedly cancelled by its publisher, forcing us to reduce our staff by 12 people,” he said.

Luckily, Schafer was able to confirm that the remainder of Double Fine’s ongoing projects, including Broken Age, Massive Chalice and the remaster of Grim Fandngo, are alive and well and that their teams are “unaffected.” That’s a good thing since any ill news about Broken Age or Massive Chalice would likely have gone over poorly with the many gamers who funded them through Kickstarter.

The game, which will be made by Tim Schafer’s studio Double Fine Productions, was announced today via a live-action trailer that featured Schafer attempting to pitch a game to indie publisher and Majesco subsidiary Midnight City. According to the trailer, the new game will launch for Halloween 2014.

The game will, of course, be a follow-up to 2010’s Costume Quest which focused on the player’s Halloween-centric quest to save their sibling. The original game was, for many, a fan favorite and received critical acclaim for its unique concept and light-hearted take on RPGs. Sadly, outside of its release window, the announcement trailer revealed little else about the game. That said, it’s official YouTube description promises “more quests and more candy than ever before!”

]]>http://www.gamefront.com/costume-quest-2-announced/feed/0Broken Age Review: Delightful But Disinterestedhttp://www.gamefront.com/broken-age-review/
http://www.gamefront.com/broken-age-review/#commentsWed, 22 Jan 2014 01:16:40 +0000Phil Hornshawhttp://www.gamefront.com/?p=260701Broken Age is a gorgeous, often funny return to adventure games for Tim Schafer and Double Fine, but it's also too often dull and shallow.

Broken Age tells the story of two young people who come into their own, defying the will of their respective parental figures, making decisions for themselves and risking failure.

It’s a fair allegory for developer Double Fine itself, and the story of the creation of Broken Age. Funded by a record-setting Kickstarter back in 2012, the project sees Double Fine striking out specifically without the backing (or meddling) of a publisher. Broken Age sees the developer returning its big-name talent like Tim Schafer to the genre that first brought him acclaim, with no mandates except for Double Fine to make what it wants, how it wants to make it.

So it’s interesting that Broken Age often feels a little thin. Despite its strange and interesting parallel stories, one set aboard a space ship, the other in a less technologically savvy terrestrial society, Broken Age feels like it’s holding back. Its lead characters are flat and maybe even a little disinterested, its puzzles are usually pretty straightforward, and its stories present locations and characters that pop up for one or two lines and seem to fall directly into irrelevancy.

With the chains of publisher tyranny broken, one would think Double Fine would have taken more risks, but Broken Age instead feels like playing it safe.

That’s not to say that Double Fine hasn’t brought its trademark polish and delight to Broken Age, though. The game’s pervasively beautiful art sets a tone that’s echoed throughout in vibrant colors and textures, and it carries a simplicity and ease of play that makes it instantly accessible. Like other point-and-click adventure games, it’s all about solving puzzles by tracking down the right object for the job, and you only need to mouse around a scene to find the right, usually pretty obvious, things to click on.

This is actually only the first half of Broken Age, the game’s first act, and within that framework are two stories that players can switch between freely (although you may never find a need to do so). The first follows Vella, a young girl living in the pastry making town of Sugar Bunting, who is about to be sacrificed to a giant monster called Mog Chathra — a great honor, everyone tells her, but a role she’s understandably none too happy with.

When it finally comes time to be offered up to the huge Mog at the “Maiden’s Feast,” Vella opts out, much to the chagrin and dishonor of her family, and so begins a journey to try to destroy the creature to protect her village. Along the way, she stumbles through a number of goofy locales and across their inhabitants, like a cult that lives on clouds (led by a somewhat shockingly underplayed guru voiced by Jack Black) or a paranoid woodworker who hears trees scream as he chops them (voiced by Wil Wheaton and my second-favorite character in the game).

Update: A few moments ago, Double Fine sent another email to backers, noting that it had “decided to go ahead and lift the embargo on Broken Age reviews.”

“The decision to set this originally was not made with any sort of malicious or controlling intent, but rather to keep spoilers to a minimum and give press time to enjoy the game, reflect on it, and write a review without feeling rushed to get it out first,” the email states. “However, it’s clear the excitement will be difficult to contain.”

Still, the decision to attempt to place an embargo on paying customers at all, press or not, is a troubling one. As the original article states, permission to post reviews, or not, was never Double Fine’s to give to its backers, regardless of intention.

Similarly, you can’t make videos of certain portions or share certain spoilers. Double Fine set down its royal decree of such rules in Update No. 31 for its Kickstarter backers, stating that press backers and “those with blogs” are officially under the embargo set for press receiving pre-release code today of the first episode of Broken Age. Double fine is “requiring” reviews be held until Jan. 21, the update says.

“We’re also preparing to send out review codes to press, who will be under review embargo until January 27,” the update states. “This embargo also applies to any of you backers who are in the press or have blogs — we are requiring all formal reviews be held until January 27 at 10am Pacific time (6pm GMT). The same time limit applies to the press as to backers; everyone is in the same boat! We’re trying to be as fair as possible given that backers will have access to the game before everyone else.”

The only thing the update fails to mention is that Double Fine lacks any authority to make any such rules, for press backers, for backers with blogs, or for anyone else.

Embargoes are a bit of a tricky thing in the gaming press world, but as I explained in my rundown of how game reviews work, they’re not some kind of binding agreement — they’re courtesies. Unless a non-disclosure agreement has been signed by the press member pledging to hold back a review or coverage of a game until a certain time, which does happen, an embargo is merely an agreement between press and developer or publisher. In the case of reviews, it goes something like, “We’ll provide you with early code of our game for you to review it, if you’re willing to wait until a certain time and date to publish.” It’s part of the working relationship between press and game companies that allows the review system to function.

The above example is an embargo to which both parties agree, and in most cases it’s perfectly fine. It makes sense — outlets are given time to work with the game and aren’t forced to race each other to finish reviews (and therefore incentivized to rush and do a bad job), while publishers and developers are allowed some control over when reviews are made available to the public, to a point.

In Double Fine’s case, the embargo in the backer update reads more like an executive order. It’s certainly no sort of agreement between anyone. I’m a backer of Broken Age; I paid for it as a pre-order of the game because I intended to cover it when it became available, and there are times when either Game Front as a publication or I as a journalist will purchase games for the purpose of writing about them. I paid for Broken Age. I backed it for early access.

And Double Fine has zero right to dictate any sort of rules on how I cover something I paid to own.

Of course, I understand that part of Double Fine’s ostensible reasoning behind the embargo is fairness for all outlets, with everyone aiming their reviews at the same time, whether they paid for their version through Kickstarter or received a review copy from Double Fine.

However, ensuring fairness and ongoing relationships with press outlets by offering them fairness is not my problem. It’s Double Fine’s.

AAA games shipped in a near unplayable state, DLC available for pre-order (in some cases for said unplayable games), early alphas sold for full-game prices… it’s 2014 and in many ways it seems like we’re living in a broken age.

See what I did there?

Yes, another item must be added to the growing list of painful contemporary game industry trends: the Kickstarted video game that is cancelled, delayed, or delivered as something different than the developers promised in their pitch. Enter Tim Schafer and the project that kickstarted the gaming Kickstarter craze, Broken Age. Tomorrow, the beta of the first half of the adventure game more than 87,000 contributors shelled out $3.3 million for back in spring 2012 is finally set to arrive for backers. Schafer made the announcement via Twitter:

Next Tuesday is going to be exciting because that’s when backers can play Broken Age, Act 1! Public release date will be announced then too.

I backed the project formerly known as Double Fine Adventure. I’m among those who thinks Schafer suffered a mental break when he decided not to deliver the $3.3 million adventure game he promised, opting instead for a project that cost twice as much, took twice as long, and, oh yeah, he needs more money for. Imagine what would have happened if he only got the $400,000 he originally asked for.

Still, an old school adventure game from the guy who brought us Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion, Grim Fandango and Psychonauts is impossible not to be excited about. Damn you, Tim Schafer, I can’t wait to see what you’ve been working on.

Backers will find out tomorrow when Broken Age arrives. Hopefully it will kickstart a positive new game industry trend: the return of the old-school adventure.

In a message to backers on Kickstarter this week, Double Fine boss Tim Schafer wrote a lengthy explanation about what has delayed the development of the game, originally dubbed “Double Fine Adventure.” According to Schafer, despite originally asking for $400,000 and telling backers the game would be completed in “six to eight months,” the influx of additional money caused him to design a game that was much larger in scope than what Broken Age was originally meant to be, and that in turn caused a serious overestimation of what Double Fine could do with its backer money and how long it would take.

“…we weren’t going to have to cut the game in half, we were going to have to cut it down by 75 percent!”

“We looked into what it would take to finish just first half of our game — Act 1,” Schafer wrote. “And the numbers showed it coming in July of next year. Not this July, but July 2014. For just the first half. The full game was looking like 2015! My jaw hit the floor.

“This was a huge wake-up call for all of us. If this were true, we weren’t going to have to cut the game in half, we were going to have to cut it down by 75 percent! What would be left? How would we even cut it down that far? Just polish up the rooms we had and ship those? Reboot the art style with a dramatically simpler look? Remove the Boy or Girl from the story? Yikes! Sad faces all around.”

Instead, Schafer wrote, the plan is to release Broken Age in two parts. Part 1, the first act of the story, is being aimed for January, and Double Fine means to use Steam Early Access to sell the game to more players. Buying into the Early Access will net players Part 1, and the money raised there will go toward completing Part 2. The second half of the game will be released as a free download, and Double Fine doesn’t mean to charge anyone for it twice. Backers will still get early access to the Broken Age beta version ahead of the release on Steam. That way, backers and other customers still get access to part of the game without too serious a delay, while Double Fine gathers the funds and takes the time necessary to complete Broken Age’s second half.

The announcement kicked off backlash among some of the nearly 90,000 backers of Broken Age, many who were angry at Double Fine for failing to keep the promises it made in the campaign and for looking for even more money to complete the project. (Our own Ron Whitaker saw this as the latest in a series of problematic situations with the crowdfunding service, and wrote about why he’ll no longer be using it.) Schafer took to Twitter to clear the air somewhat, however:

“Double Fine is NOT asking for more money. We are fine, financially. We are using our OWN money to deliver a bigger game than we Kickstarted,” Schafer wrote.

Double Fine is NOT asking for more money. We are fine, financially. We are using our OWN money to deliver a bigger game than we Kickstarted.

That’s not quite the case, however, as Schafer noted in the Kickstarter message that Double Fine didn’t have the funds to complete the game without finding some additional source of revenue, which is what led to the Steam Early Access plan.

“Clearly, any overages were going to have to be paid by Double Fine, with our own money from the sales of our other games,” he wrote. “That actually makes a lot of sense and we feel good about it. We have been making more money since we began self-publishing our games, but unfortunately it still would not be enough.”

From the standpoint of backers, things are a bit contentious at the moment. While Double Fine still has quite a bit of goodwill in the gaming community, it’s difficult not to wonder if the eventual completion of Broken Age might be in peril. Schafer assuaged some of those fears in his note to backers, stating, “…the good news is that the game’s design is now 100 percent done, so most of the unknowns are now gone and it’s not going to get any bigger.”

Double Fine’s massive Kickstarter campaign for the turn-based tactical game Massive Challice has panned out in a mass…err, big way since it was first launched last month, with an ending tally of $1,229,015, nearly doubling that of its $750,000 goal.

The campaign didn’t do anywhere as well as the studio’s first Kickstarter, Double Fine Adventure, did—perhaps indicating a wariness towards Kickstarter campaigns in general, or perhaps because Double Fine has yet to deliver on its first campaign. Double Fine Adventure, now known as Broken Age, garnered up to $3.3 million in funding and can be regarded as the first major gaming Kickstarter that started off the whole craze of using Kickstarter as a legitimate platform for funding game development.

Both titles are being developed simultaneously at Double Fine, which appears to have the manpower to commit themselves to multiple simultaneous projects.

Earlier this month, Massive Chalice’s lead developer, Brad Muir, announced that the game would incorporate same-sex marriage, which he apologized for overlooking when initially designing the game.

The game is expected to come out in September 2014 for the PC, Mac, and Linux.

Lately, developer Double Fine has been trading on the nostalgia attached to its own brand.

Take Double Fine Adventure, a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign for a pretty vague adventure game (we literally knew almost nothing about it when it was getting its crowd-sourced funding) that was more or less sold on the idea of players remembering and liking games such as The Secret of Monkey Island.

The Cave feels that way too — a game predicated on the idea that other games made by Double Fine are amazing, and so too is this one. But where other games in Double Fine’s library, like Psychonauts and Stacking, have done the work to earn that reverence for the developer, The Cave falls well short, failing to bring along anything exceptional. It’s a nice enough game, but marred by lots of design decisions that make it irritating. It’s kinda funny, with some kinda-smart puzzles and a kinda-fun premise. And so the final product is only kinda good.

Seven characters are yours to choose from at the outset of your run through The Cave, and the whole game is narrated by the titular subterranean hollow, which happens to also be sentient and a bit snarky. The people who gather at the Cave do so to search for the things they desire most, and all the characters are awful people seemingly guilty of some terrible transgressions in their lives. They’re also collected from across time and space, from both the distant past and the distant future, which suggests along with the game’s subject matter that The Cave is a place of judgment, possibly a kind of purgatory. (I’m also of the thinking that the stories of the characters represent the Seven Deadly Sins.)

To star the game, players choose three of the seven characters and venture into the Cave, which is done by grabbing a nearby crowbar and prying off the boards that bar entry. Once you choose your three characters, you’re stuck with them, and who you choose affects the story as the game tells it to you. That’s because the Cave is full of areas that are specifically modeled on the backstories and characteristics of the people you bring with you, and while you’ll pass levels you can’t access because you don’t have the right people in your party, it also means multiple playthroughs are necessary to see everything.

You can interpret that last bit — the requirement of multiple playthroughs — in more than one way. On the one hand, it’s good, because The Cave stays organic in that it’s a different experience, somewhat, the first and second times you play through. It’s also a negative consideration because that means you can’t experience the whole game in one shot, and you have to replay roughly half the game to see the new content. To get through all seven characters’ stories, you have to make three total runs through the game, complete with solving several of the same puzzles and passing through the same areas over and over again. That’s not replayability, it’s tedium.

Logistically, the game is set up like a side-scrolling Metroidvania title, requiring players to move both vertically and horizontally to find all the rooms and complete all the puzzles. It plays a bit like Trine, in that you have three characters and each is supposed to have his or her own special ability. The game also is billed as a platformer, but platforming elements are incredibly few and far between and never require any degree of skill; this is a platform only in that it’s a sidescrolling game organized vertically, and so you have to hit the jump button to get to rooms that are positioned above you.

Via The Cave designer Ron Gilbert’s Twitter comes the news that no one has been waiting for, but everyone is happy to hear. Insult Swordfighting is the best-loved and best-remembered element of classic LucasArts adventure The Secret of Monkey Island, and it’s now playable in your browser! Take command as protagonist Guybrush Threepwood squares off in a battle of wits against the pirates of Meelee Island, building an arsenal of bon mots and verbal counter-thrusts that were written by creators Gilbert, Tim Schafer, and Dave Grossman, with help from Sci-Fi writer Orson Scott Card, who visited the studio during development. Rarely have writing and game design worked together so harmoniously, or so hilariously. Here’s a pro tip: I am rubber, you are glue” is always the wrong answer.

In the wake of THQ’s depressing bankruptcy troubles, all sorts of companies are looking over the fallen business, hoping to pull something useful from its carcass. We’ve heard that EA and Activision were both interested, and now we can add another company to that list. Double Fine, the company headed by Tim Schafer, has requested documents as well, according to the Distressed Debt Twitter feed.

THQ: Both Warner Brothers and Double Fine productions have asked for bankruptcy filings in the THQ case

What we can’t tell from this tweet or from any information we have so far is what Double Fine is looking at. Could they be trying to acquire a new IP like Saints Row? It’s doubtful, as they’d likely be bidding against the deep pockets of EA and Activision. However, there is another possibility. THQ published two games developed by Double Fine: Stacking and Costume Quest. It could be that THQ retains some (or all) rights to those IPs, and Double Fine is trying to get them back under their control.

We’re seeking more information on this as we speak, and we’ll update this post if we can clarify who owns these IPs, and what Double Fine might be after. Bidding on THQ’s assets will begin on Tuesday, January 22.

Still, a Saint’s Row adventure game? That could be all kinds of cool, right?

Double Fine’s Ron Gilbert has been working on a game called The Cave, and it seems that everyone who plays it loves it, if what I was hearing at E3 2012 was any indication.

I haven’t tried it personally, but seeing the game in action in trailers and screenshots on its shiny new Steam pages makes me want to. And since it’ll be out later this month, you might want to start paying attention to it, too, if you haven’t been already.

You can check out the newly minted Steam page right here, which includes all the usual details, as well as the “January 2013″ release date (hey, that’s now!). What isn’t included, however, is the ability to pre-order the game just yet. One wonders if perhaps Valve is being a little more careful slapping that button on pages after the debacle surrounding The War Z.

Anyway, I, for one, am a big Double Fine fan. What do you guys think of The Cave?

Last week, we told you about Double Fine’s fourth annual Amnesia Fortnight game jam, specifically that the developer was letting fans vote on which titles pitched during it would be turned into playable prototypes. Well, the Humble Bundle-backed voting has wrapped up and the winners have been chosen. They are:

Now that the winners have been chosen, the company is dividing into five teams in order to create playable prototypes of each. These teams will spend two weeks on their development, after which the demos will be posted for those who contributed to Humble Bundle to download.

During the coming development, 2 Player Productions — the documentary crew that’s chronicling the Double Fine Adventure project — will be livestreaming from the Double Fine offices, providing a wrap-up video at the end of each day. Anyone can watch the stream, but the daily videos are only for paid viewers who’ll be sent a special URL via email.

For a couple of years now, the delightfully deranged gang at San Francisco-based Double Fine Productions (Psychonauts, Brutal Legend) has been staging two-week-long “Amnesia Fortnight” events during which employees are encouraged to forget whatever they’re working on and pitch new game ideas, the best of which are then chosen to become full prototypes. Examples of such games that have seen the light of day include Costume Quest and Iron Brigade. For this year’s Amnesia Fortnight, the developer decided to do something different: Allow its fans to choose the four pitches that get turned into prototypes.

Double Fine has partnered with the Humble Bundle to facilitate the process. By donating any amount over $1, you gain not only the right to vote on 23 pitches, but can also download the original prototypes for Costume Quest and Once Upon a Monster (originally called Happy Song) right now. Not only that, but you’ll be able to download playable prototypes of the four games chosen by gamers once they’re complete. Of course, since the selection process is part of the Humble Bundle, you can choose to put as much of your payment as you’d like towards charitable causes such as Child Play Charity and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

2 Player Productions, the documentary team that’s following the development of Double Fine’s upcoming crowdfunded title Double Fine Adventure, will be chronicling the creation of the four prototypes once they’ve been chosen. This means you’ll get to watch talented developers put together working versions of games like Hack n’ Slash, a Zelda-alike where you can hack the game code to win, or a giant monster grappler called Kaiju Piledriver — if those two get enough votes, that is.

There’s one week left to take part and vote on which pitches should become full prototypes. The second week of Amnesia Fortnight will be devoted to the development of the chosen titles. Check out the Amnesia Fortnight site right here.

Obsidian Entertainment’s Kickstarter campaign for its upcoming isometric RPG, Project Eternity, has become the most-funded campaign in the service’s history at $3.56 million as of this writing — even surpassing Double Fine’s record-setting Double Fine Adventure.

The campaign ends tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific, if you want to throw additional money Obisidian’s way. The developer has earned so much, it has hit all kinds of stretch goals, including adding new classes and a player-owned stronghold that allows you to control it and its surrounding lands. By comparison, Double Fine’s Kickstarter wound up at $3,336,371

Obisidian added one last stretch goal for the $3.5 million mark: the addition of another giant city to the game. Here’s the description of what the stretch goal includes:

“Baldur’s Gate and Athkatla are big cities. Spanning multiple large maps with a ton of interiors, characters and quests, big cities are a lot of fun. Like strongholds, they also take a lot of work to do well. We’re going to have one big city in Project Eternity. Would you like two? If you take us on an exciting adventure to $3.5 Million, we will take you on an exciting adventure to another big city.”

Feargus Urquhart, founder and CEO of Obsidian Entertainment, said during a Q&A session on the Kickstarter campaign for Obsidian’s Project Eternity that the developer had been approached by publishers looking to do Kickstarter campaigns. Urquhart said those publishers, which he didn’t name, were looking to get Obsidian to lead a Kickstarter, raise some money, and then use that money to fund development on some unnamed game, with the publisher to then, well, publish the title.

Urquhart softened the situation slightly in his description, explaining that individuals within publishers come from different departments, those different departments have differing budgets, and those departments often have to compete with one another to get the funds necessary to make games. So Kickstarter could potentially present a way for an individual working at a publisher to do a project with Obsidian, or another developer; a project that might not get greenlit by the brass under other circumstances.

But as Urquhart explained, it wasn’t a winning deal for Obsidian, mostly because, he said, he didn’t think the folks at those publishers had considered the dev’s side of the deal.

“I said to them ‘So, you want us to do a Kickstarter for, using our name, we then get the Kickstarter money to make the game, you then publish the game, but we then don’t get to keep the brand we make and we only get a portion of the profits’ They said, ‘Yes’,” Urquhart wrote.

While I don’t doubt that Urquhart is right, and the individual people at different publishers aren’t bad folks, this does not bode well for Kickstarter. It indicates that the big money people in this industry are catching on to a sad but core truth about the crowdfunding service — there’s free money out there, and players are willing to give it.

Kickstarter is Not a Money-Grab

On some level it makes sense that publishers would be interested in seeing what they might be able to do with Kickstarter. Making games is expensive — that’s why publishers exist at all. They provide the money to make things happen, and when they do that, they take a big cut of the profits and control the property from there on. It can sound douchey for developers, and sometimes it is douchey. But by and large, publishers throw a whole helluva lot of money at game development and marketing; the system in which they get a financial benefit for playing that part makes sense.

Kickstarter can provide publishers, especially with many departments and a lot of overhead, the same promising outlook it gives to indie developers and even established ones who don’t have the money to invest in a project. There’s a micro-view of this situation in which an employee of a publisher sees Kickstarter as an opportunity to make a game happen that otherwise wouldn’t. Money saved on the development end means more could be spent on marketing, say. There’s a rosey perspective on the whole thing, to be sure.

But the result of publishers finding a way to exploit Kickstarter will be a money-grab, because for a publisher it’s like taking out a loan it doesn’t need to pay back. When you give Kickstarter funds to a developer, you’re exchanging your money for the work the developer will do. An exchange takes place. Kickstart a game for a publisher and there is no exchange; the money still goes to the developer, who exchanges work, but the publisher collects without giving. The developer bears the consequences of failure; the publisher collects money. And Kickstarter is not a well of free money, and should not be treated as such. The second that it is (and I think we’re already moving in that direction at a frightening clip), it loses all credibility and becomes a way to take advantage of players.

And the history of the way big companies do things suggests that you’d be deluding yourself to think they’ll be altruistic with such funds. There may even be good intentions behind this, but these companies exist to profit. If they can find a way to reduce costs, they increase profits — they don’t spend that money elsewhere just because it would be nice of them to do so.

The simple question is, if publishers have such great intentions, why aren’t they being up-front about their own Kickstarter campaigns in the first place? The simple answer: Because it would be akin to Bill Gates asking for money to sell you Internet Explorer. He wouldn’t be making Internet Explorer (an actual software developer would), and he’d be taking no risk in bringing it to market — he gets all the upside of selling something that could be popular. You’re paying him to give him a chance to make money off you.

Fleecing the Player

There’s a fundamental level at which the whole endeavor is dishonest, however, regardless of how it’s painted or how a publisher might see benefit in using Kickstarter. The reason Kickstarter exists at all is because publishers control money. Because they control money, they determine which creative endeavors are created and which are not. These decisions are made based on which creative endeavors are most likely to provide the publishers with a profit — because profiting is what publishers exist to do.

Kickstarter is not for publishers. In the case of video games, it exists as a way that developers can get around the corporate machinery or lack of resources that otherwise would kill their work. It’s for niche ideas and people who can’t otherwise make their ideas come to fruition. And it relies on a sense of need, of altruism, on the part of people who contribute funds. It requires trust — trust that the person asking for money truly needs it, and that he or she will use it as stated.

The publishers in question, in asking Obsidian to lead a Kickstarter campaign, are looking to parlay Obsidian’s fan-base and its trust in the developer into free money. They want to use the developer’s name, which has a lot of love and goodwill attached, and pair it with the underlying conceit of the Kickstarter service — that the money is needed or the project cannot be made. The fact that a publisher is attached makes that second part untrue: the publisher could fund the game if it wanted to, but it would rather not. There’s less risk and less cost involved; the publisher maximizes profit while minimizing risk and cost, which is its core function. In that scenario, the publisher collects money and ownership, bought with the developer’s good name and what amounts to a lie to players. And it gives nothing for these benefits.

Not only does the publisher not contribute, but it’s important that we note this again: it’s lying in this scenario. It’s taking advantage of players, developers, and the Kickstarter community in a terrible way. Bottom line: it’s a swindle.

The Death of Kickstarter

Right now, there’s already a great deal of mistrust with the Kickstarter service, even as it raises huge funds for creative endeavors. I’ve repeatedly heard prognostications of the service’s failure when a big endeavor finally falls through, when the money poured in by excited contributors evaporates, and everyone feels like they’ve been had by the person who created the project. Such a situation is not hard to imagine, and while Kickstarter has protections in place, it’s still a service that takes money from excited people who are gambling on something that might exist in the future.

So legitimacy for Kickstarter isn’t just important, it’s everything. Contributors need to know that when they give money, Kickstarter is holding up its end to make sure everything is on the up-and-up. If publishers are covertly setting up Kickstarter campaigns with developers who are pretending to need the funds, that legitimacy is utterly destroyed. How can you trust that a Kickstarter really isn’t just a moneygrab at that point? Any game developer could secretly be using their community, or even relative indie-ness, to draw in funds for a publisher. And the publisher, who provides nothing but funding, does not need more money. It’s akin to claiming you’re collecting donations for charity, without revealing that the charity is your own beer fund.

If there’s one entity in this whole situation that needs to step up, it’s Kickstarter. Tougher rules against people gaming the system — especially huge corporations with plenty of money — must be implemented and enforced. Loudly. Publically. With legal action. Otherwise, all the good that Kickstarter does and could do for creative people will be destroyed. Without trust, without legitimacy, Kickstarter can’t survive. We need to know that giving money to Kickstarter is not an open invitation to be fleeced.

Meanwhile, publishers: Stay the hell away from Kickstarter. What Urquhart describes is incredibly dishonest and unethical, and it’ll destory Kickstarter. It’ll likely send many people out of the gaming hobby completely. You don’t need to be this greedy.

Urquhart’s full comment thread has been compiled in the Obsidian forums by players. Read it right here.